“If you look at the market right now, it is easy to take the position that carriers have massively overordered,” said analyst Lars Jensen last week. He explained that, with aging tankers and bulk ships also needing to abide by IMO decarbonization rules, “this could easily overwhelm the shipyards with orders.”
He added: “That means in three or four years, a container line might want new ships, but either can’t get them because there is zero shipyard availability, or they are going to be phenomenally expensive. This will be the shipyard version of what the carriers did during the pandemic.”
A report released on August 17 supports this theory: Both newbuild and retrofit yard space is too constrained to provide sufficient capacity for meeting the IMO’s 2030 ‘indicative checkpoint.’
Read more in an article from The Loadstar.